Steve Canavan: Our new kitten Bobby is like a feline version of Lord Lucan

We have a new addition to the family – not another child, that would break me. No, the newcomer is a black and white kitten by the name of Bobbie (name chosen by my three-year-old, and better than her first choice of Margaret Smargeret … she’s going through a weird phase of rhyming everything).

Bobbie has been purchased to replace Percy, our previous cat who, days before his sixth birthday, went for an ill-fated wander on the main road and met his maker.

I say met his maker, he actually met a Volvo Estate travelling at speed. Percy, sadly, and much flatter than he was before, went to feline heaven, which was slightly annoying as I’d just that very morning purchased a brand new bag of quite expensive cat food.

For a long time I avoided telling Mary, at the time two-years-old, what had happened.

She was so innocent, blissfully unaware that bad things happened in the world, had no idea about the notion of death, and I didn’t want to prick her little bubble of innocence.

“Where’s Percy?” she repeatedly asked.

“He’s, erm, gone for a walk,” I said desperately, which I know wasn’t a great explanation but it was the best I could come up with.

I used this same excuse for about four months – by which point Mary would have been forgiven for thinking, ‘hell of a walk this’ – but then my older sister, a wise and all-knowing individual, told me it was important to address difficult issues and to make children aware of death at an early age because it’s then much less of a shock than when they inevitably find out about it later.

So one day when Mary again asked, ‘daddy, where’s Percy?’ I replied, “darling, he’s dead. He got squashed under the wheels of a large car and I buried his bloodied squashed body in a bin liner in the front garden.”

She took the news incredibly well, or at least she did after completing a six-week counselling course.

Anyway since this happened a year or so ago she’s been asking if we can get a new cat about, oh I don’t know, six or seven times an hour.

I didn’t really want a new cat – the grass on the front lawn hasn’t been the same since we buried Percy – and so was resisting her pleas.

It was with some surprise, therefore, that I arrived home from work last week to find a shrieking Mary bouncing around the kitchen, shouting ‘daddy we’ve got a new cat’.

“Have we?” I replied, shooting Mrs Canavan a quizzical look.

‘I couldn’t resist it,’ said Mrs C, looking slightly sheepish.

“Oh, well next time I see an offer for a month-long solo break in a log cabin in Scotland, I won’t resist it either,” I replied.

My attempt at a withering, barbed remark failed though, as she’d already turned her back and walked off before I had chance to complete it, and Mary was so ecstatic about the new arrival that it was difficult to remain angry for long.

The only thing was that I couldn’t see the kitten, for it – quite understandably given it had been released into a small room with two children under the age of three, who had run after it trying to prod it and touch it and generally traumatise it for life – had hidden behind a cupboard in the corner of the room and was refusing to come out.

This was slightly disappointing to the children, who had no doubt been expecting a cat they could if not play with, then at least see. As it was we spent the next five hours crouching around the cupboard making that odd noise that all humans make to cats – ‘chush chush chush’ – before giving up sometime around midnight and wondering if we’d ever see our new moggy again.

As the week has gone on, Bobbie, who is seven-weeks-old and obviously the shy type, has shown her face a few times – occasionally scampering across the kitchen, normally as you are walking past with two cups of tea so that you jump up in fright and spill a load on the floor – but has largely stayed out of view.

We’re not too concerned as the woman from the cat sanctuary says it can take as long as 10 days for kittens to get comfortable in new surroundings.

But in the meantime disaster nearly struck.

Unbeknown to me Mrs Canavan has placed a toy shop we have for the kids against the fireplace, to stop the cat getting up the chimney.

When Mrs C went out on Sunday, I moved the shop to the centre of the room to play with the children and then, without thinking, went out for the day (don’t fret, I took the kids with me).

A few hours later I received a phonecall from a very agitated Mrs Canavan informing me the cat was up the chimney and ‘why the (exert quite an explicit expletive here) had I moved the shop?’

Worse still, from putting her hand inside and taking a picture on her phone, it turned out the cat was lodged in a small hole.

‘She’s stuck,’ shrieked Mrs Canavan. ‘Oh my god, what if it can’t get out and starves to death’.

“Listen,” I said. “Cats don’t get stuck. Just chill out, it’ll come out when it’s ready.”

‘Don’t tell me to chill out,’ she barked. ‘I’ve spent the last two hours on my stomach calling her name.’

“But that’s why she’s not coming out, because you’re there,” I said. “If you move away and go and do something else, she’ll come out.”

This domestic continued over the phone for several minutes before Mrs C abruptly announced, ‘right, I’m calling the fire brigade’.

“What?” I stammered. “You can’t ring 999 for a kitten in a fireplace. They’d think we were insane.”

‘No, they wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve messaged Becky, you know, the one whose husband works in the fire service, and he says they’d come and rip the fireplace out to get her.’

“Rip the fireplace out?” I exclaimed. “Are you mad? It’ll cost us thousands to fix. Can you not just, I don’t know, tie a little loop in a piece of string and try and lasso it round the neck?”

‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ Mrs Canavan barked back – and on it went.

I finally got her to agree to be patient and wait an hour or two to see if the cat came out - and, lo and behold, she called back five minutes later to announce Bobbie had freed herself. I tried, possibly unsuccessfully, not to respond ‘I told you so’.

The upshot is that Bobby has not died a lonely death inside the chimney, but she is still living a lonely life hiding behind a cupboard. We’ve had her eight days now and seen her about four times. It’s like living with a feline Lord Lucan (pictured).

Fingers crossed she gets bolder soon and memo to self: do not move the shop from the fireplace.